A New Method to the Freakonomics Madness

I eagerly awaited and quickly devoured SuperFreakonomics when it appeared a few weeks ago. And while many reviewers are focusing on the substance of the book, I'm struck by two shifts in the Levitt/Dubner method.

First, SuperFreakonomics is more of an effort at problem solving. The original Freakonomics book showed how creative econometrics applied to historic data could be used to uncover the "hidden" causes of observed behavior. To be sure, SuperFreakonomics retains many examples of the hidden-side-of-everything data mining. But the new book is much more of a solutions book. It uses economic thinking to generate new ideas to solve really big problems. Levitt and Dubner are admirably leveraging the success of the first book to try to make the world a better place.

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The Randomization Lens

One sign of the shift toward randomization is the prominence of John List and his rise to fame in the economics profession. John is one of the great field experimenters in economics today. He's the kind of guy who goes to baseball card shows and at random treats one set of card dealers differently from another and then sees whether they offer different prices.

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